


Cheris and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Roommate

by tonepoem



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Gen, Humor, Mathematics, Not Canon Compliant, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-26
Updated: 2016-10-26
Packaged: 2018-08-27 01:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonepoem/pseuds/tonepoem
Summary: Cadet Cheris is punished with the worst roommate ever.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astrokath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrokath/gifts).



It was Ajewen Cheris's second term at Kel Academy, and she had thought she was finally settling in when a message popped up on her slate:

SEE ME IMMEDIATELY RE: FIRST PRELIM, it said. The sender was her math instructor, Kel Vinang.

Cheris's heart sank. Surely she hadn't bombed the prelim? She worried all the time about fouling up the regs that all Kel cadets were required to memorize, or getting the angle of her salute wrong, but math was supposed to be something she was _good_ at.

Still, SEE ME IMMEDIATELY was unambiguous. Cheris messaged back a hasty acknowledgment, closed the tabs to her favorite fanfiction archives, and snatched up the slate, then hurried out of her dorm room and went uphill to the math hall. Thanks to a special trick of variable layout, going _anywhere_ was always uphill. Kel Academy considered it excellent physical conditioning.

Inured to this, Cheris dashed to Instructor Vinang's office--on the third floor, no less, and of course there were no lifts--and arrived out of breath. The instructor had left his door open. She peered in to verify that he was there, a solitary figure frowning over--oh. That must be her prelim booklet. Even upside-down she recognized the painstakingly neat rows of her own handwriting. Cheris knocked on the door to announce herself, then saluted when Vinang raised his head.

"Ah, Cadet Ajewen Cheris," Vinang said. "That's you?"

She'd sat in the front row every class, and he was mispronouncing her name besides, but she held her peace. "Yes, sir," she said.

"At ease, and have a seat."

Cheris sat, trying to hide her worry.

Vinang regarded her cynically, then rotated the booklet so it faced her. An entire page had been circled emphatically in green marker. Bad sign: green was a Vidona color. Instructors saved green markup for _possibly heretical_. "You realize that most people wouldn't bother inventing a whole new branch of math as a side-thought?"

"Sir?"

"This lemma." He stabbed the page with his capped marker. "At least, you call it a lemma. Much more far-reaching than a mere lemma. And more like an _entirely heretical system_."

"Sir," Cheris burst out, "I haven't had time to work through the implications, but I _think_ if you follow that line of thought, we'll be able to resolve the Goldbach conjecture _and_ the moving sofa problem _and_ the whole P versus NP--"

" _Cadet_ ," Vinang said severely, "if you wanted to mess around with famous unsolved mathematical problems, you should have joined the Nirai like they told you to. My job as your math instructor is just to shove enough abstract algebra down your throat that you can wrangle left cosets or use row-reduction techniques to compute the occasional determinant in an emergency if the computer algebra system crashes."

Cheris took a couple deep breaths. "I'm sorry, sir."

"Sorry won't cut it," Vinang said. "There will have to be a penalty."

She tried to think if she'd read anything in the Kel code of conduct that applied to her situation and came up blank, although maybe it was in one of the classified sections. Especially given the connection to heresy.

"We're shuffling you into a new dorm room," Vinang said.

"Sir?" Cheris said cautiously. She would miss her current roommate, Nerevor, who was great at torrenting all the latest dramas, like Dueling with the Stars. But as penalties went this didn't sound so bad.

"You will have a new roommate, of course," Vinang said.

"?" Cheris said, still not sure why this was a punishment as opposed to, say, cleaning all the toilets or being forced to eat rancid kimchi for a month.

He tapped his own slate. From the corner of his desk, a printer exuded a slip of paper. "This is your new room assignment." He slid the paper across to her.

Cheris glanced down at it. She was being moved to Dormitory Four, which, fine. There were worse things than lucky unlucky four. But who was Shuos Jedao, and more importantly, what was a Shuos doing at Kel Academy? Especially since he had presumably already graduated from Shuos Academy? "A _Shuos_ , sir?" Tactfully, she did not say, _Foxes are NOT totally trustworthy._

"He's a special case," Vinang said irritably. "He needs a math tutor. That's you. Have fun! And stay out of trouble."

Cheris recognized a dismissal when she heard one. "Yes, sir." She saluted and retreated.

* * *

Finding the new room wasn't difficult. It was on the fourth and highest floor of Dormitory Four, in the corner farthest from the stairwell. Of course.

Cheris came to the door and knocked hesitantly on it. "Hello?"

"Howdy there. Door's unlocked," a male voice called out. Shuos Jedao, presumably. He spoke with a distinctive drawl.

Cheris opened the door and peeked in. "I'm your new roommate," she informed Jedao, who was sprawled on the bed lovingly reassembling a squirt gun. At least, she hoped it was a squirt gun. "Uh--were you planning on shooting me with that?"

"Of course not," he said, affronted. "I only shoot annoying people."

"Um," Cheris said.

Jedao had left his belongings all over the room, including the second bed. At a glance, Cheris cataloged the largest collection of squirt guns she had ever seen, an assortment of chess pieces and meeples in clashing styles and made from wildly different materials, a pile of folded underwear that he had neglected to put in the dresser...

"Oh," Jedao said, "you probably want some space. Let me." Cheerfully, he shoved the squirt gun under his bed, giving Cheris a glimpse of rumpled fuzzy socks, a dog-eared Oubliettes and Orangutans gamemaster manual, a pair of plush fuchsia glow-in-the-dark dice, and--was that a red-haired cosplay wig? Then he set about taking everything on Cheris's side of the room and redepositing it in piles on his side of the room. He was surprisingly efficient.

"This is never going to pass inspection," Cheris said, eyeing Jedao's side of the room. Her head was beginning to hurt. She was wondering just how bad her new roommate was at math and how much math she could cram into him in a single session so she could flee and beg for a reassignment.

"If you insist," Jedao said, and starting putting _all the things_ under the bed. Oddly enough, he avoided standing right next to the bed. Instead, he approached it diagonally.

"They're not going to fall for that!"

"Of course they won't," Jedao said, giving her a bemused look. "You haven't looked up, have you?"

Involuntarily, Cheris looked up.

Mounted on the ceiling complete with turret, pointing straight down toward the bed's edge, was the largest and most phallic squirt gun Cheris had ever seen.

"Do you like it?" Jedao said happily. "It will trigger if someone stops _right there_ to look under the bed. The chemical cocktail I have it loaded with will knock them out and give them retroactive amnesia. It's great stuff. A friend of mine named Kujen brewed it up. He's into science so I figured why not take advantage?"

"Um," Cheris said again. "Wouldn't it be easier just to keep your"-- _our_ \--"room clean in the first place?"

Jedao shrugged. "Yeah, but where's the fun in that?"

 _This is going to be a very long year,_ Cheris thought.


End file.
